Six Scottish Courtly and Chivalric Poems, Including Lyndsay's Squyer Meldrum

These six poems explore late medieval Scotland’s engagement with courtly and chivalric values. Sir David Lyndsay’s sixteenth-century Historie and Testament of Squyer Meldrum blend comedy, tragedy and medieval romance to tell the biography of the real-life William Meldrum, a work which C. S. Lewis compared favorably to Chaucer’s canon. Lyndsay’s comic Answer to the Kingis Flyting cautions the promiscuous young king James V. In the three anonymous fifteenth-century poems, Robert Bruce is added to the traditional “Nine Worthies” of chivalry in the Balletis of the Nine Nobles; the tragic early death of the French dauphin’s Scottish bride is lamented in Complaint for the Death of Margaret, and moral and chivalric conduct is exemplified by the heraldic beast-narrators of the Talis of the Fyve Bestes. With extensive introductions, notes, and an Older Scots reading guide, this edition serves as a primer to important texts in the medieval Scottish tradition.